James Baquet It is a common mistake to think that all Muslims are Arabs. True, the prophet Muhammad, founder of the faith, was an Arab; the holy book the Quran is written in Arabic, and proper recitation of the text requires that it still be done in that language. But the rapid spread of Islam in the 7th century ensured that it would be embraced by a wide variety of peoples, not just native speakers of Arabic. Witness the inclusion of Persians — speakers of Farsi — into the fold. The Sassanid Persian province of Khorasan stretched across the north-eastern portion of modern Iran, and into what is now Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. The Muslim army marched on one of their capitals in 651, taking it without a fight when the king, Yazdegerd III, fled the city. Yazdegerd then returned, reinforced by Turkish allies. The Muslim leader al-Ahnaf (meaning “the Clubfooted”) broke up that alliance on the command of the caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, by convincing the Turkish khan that challenging the Arabs could lead to the loss of his own kingdom. Persian met Arab in Central Asia at the Battle of the Oxus River. Called locally Amu Darya, the river was then considered the northeastern border of Greater Iran. (“Oxus” was an exonym used by the Romans.) Yazdegerd’s army was beaten; he fled across the Oxus and through Turan to China (where, tradition says, his son — a Christian, like his wife — built a church, and became a Tang general). As he traveled, Yazdegerd was murdered by a miller; some say the man coveted his jewelry, but others claim he was an assassin sent by a Persian noble who objected to Yazdegerd’s demands for taxes. (The story of the miller is told in the “Shahnameh” or “Book of Kings,” one of the world’s longest epic poems and the national epic of Greater Iran, which tells the story of the Persian kings from the mythical past and the creation of the world until the Arab conquest of Iran. It was not written down until over three centuries after the death of Yazdegerd.) Yazdegerd was the last Sasanian king; when he died, his empire fell to the Muslims. Vocabulary: Which word above means: 1. person who grinds grain for flour 2. act of repeating words aloud 3. born with a deformed foot 4. made certain 5. poem that tells the story of a people 6. system of religious belief 7. group of religious believers 8. name used by foreigners for a place, group, language, etc. 9. accepted, adopted 10. desired wrongfully | 